The athletic and physical differences between men and women are not based on gender, they are based on sex. As @TatinG mentioned, if Caitlyn Jenner was Caitlyn Jenner during her career, she would obviously be far superior than her female constituents because she has the advantage of being biologically male.
@romanigypsyeyes I haven’t seen anyone say that a man would transition for the sake of having success in a women’s sport. I think you’re making the straw man argument.
Renee Richards herself would disagree with #38. From the Wikipedia biography.
Richards has since expressed ambivalence about her legacy, and came to believe her past as a man provided her with advantages over her competitors, saying “Having lived for the past 30 years, I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me. And so I’ve reconsidered my opinion.”[20][21]
At age 45 (!) she was ranked #20 in women’s tennis.
@calicash I guess you haven’t been watching the news lately. Many people who are worrying about these issues seem to think people can just say they’re the opposite sex and suddenly they’re Trans. You are more than welcome to find several posters saying this on the other LGBT thread over in the parents forum.
@romanigypsyeyes I have been watching the news. I assume, you are referring to some of the concerns people have over the bathroom bill. However, in context of this thread, at least when you initially mentioned straw man arguments, no one had made one.
The statement was that no female pro could beat a transgendered female.
That is just not true. I don’t care how old Renee was. She wasn’t even playing when the women were doing the physical training they do now and plenty were able to beat her.
The other statement by that poster was that no female pro can return a male pro’s serve. Guess that person has never watched the pros play mixed doubles.
But even she said that if she had transitioned in her 20’s she would have had an unfair advantage over the women.
So? She is free to say anything but it’s impossible to know if she is right as there is no way to prove that.
With a ranking of #20 at age 45, she clearly had an advantage. Not that they are apples and apples, but at age 45 Kimiko Date-Krumm is ranked #210.
What was happening in tennis in the 70ties is totally irrelevant for today. Rackets were different. Neither women nor men pros were doing physical training. Some men were drinking beer on changeovers and smoked cigarettes. No Barocamera Eggs, blood transfusions and questionable medications.
I think I was generous to women with the ranking of 500 (No, I do not have a link, just personal observations from experience). I probably should have said that most women would have problem returning the serve of most men so that the men would not win the very next point.
I do watch mixed doubles occasionally. It is a show that has to be entertaining where nobody wants to hurt a fellow pro, a chance to earn some coin for aging double specialists and a practice between important single matches for all others.
But let’s still talk about chess.
The mixed dubs teams all seem pretty ecstatic when the win a GS.
Yes, men who are pro’s can beat even Serena Williams. I saw Karsten Braasch destroy Serena while still smoking cigarettes on the changeovers. Renee Richards, OTOH was never going to be a pro as a male. A good amateur/club player as a man - not the caliber of a pro.
Let us also recall that when Joan Benoit Samuelson won the first women’s Olympic marathon, her time would have been good enough to win every men’s marathon until 1952, and would have won in 1956.
Does anyone remember Caster Semenya, a 2009 world champion in track?
"Questions about the South African’s gender were raised and she was subjected to gender tests. The results were never made public but according to reports in the Australian media, they showed that she had no womb or ovaries but internal testes. It was also reported that she had three times the normal level of testosterone of a woman. At the time of those tests, Pierre Weiss, the IAAF secretary general, said: "It is clear that she is a woman, but maybe not 100 percent.”
The Semenya furore resulted in sports’ governing bodies implementing an upper limit of testosterone for female athletes, with any woman above that limit being required to take hormones to lower their testosterone levels. Since this ruling Semenya won world silver in 2011 and Olympic silver in 2012 but was not the dominant athlete that she had been when she broke onto the scene as a teenager.
Her resurgence in form this year is likely to be down to a ruling by the Court of Arbitration of Sport (CAS) last year. Following a case involving the Indian sprinter, Dutee Chand, the rules that gave an upper limit of testosterone in women were suspended, allowing female athletes who were on testosterone-suppressing medication to come off it…
Kristen Worley is a Canadian elite transitioned XY female cyclist who alleges that the IOC’s gender-verification policies and their policies on hormone regulations and the selected levels of testosterone for females are discriminatory…
Worley argues that by forcing a female athlete to lower her natural testosterone levels, you are risking making them unwell because you are taking her out of her ‘normal’. "
In case anyone in this thread is interested in actual studies on these issues – instead of, say, engaging in wildly uninformed speculation (the kind that doesn’t differ all that much from the great many “opinion pieces” I vividly remember reading 40 years ago, insisting that a wave of young male tennis players would have “sex change surgery” to make money competing as women like Renee Richards, thereby inevitably destroying women’s sports) – I would suggest reading any or all of the following links:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brynn-tannehill/do-transgender-athletes-have-an-unfair-advantage_b_4918835.html, quoting an NCAA 2011 study concluding the following:
https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa15/2015/08/31/do-transgender-athletes-have-a-competitive-advantage/
I am so glad (for my own sake) that I didn’t notice a certain recent thread in the Parents’ Forum until after it was (thankfully) closed. Yikes.
^Donna, I tried several times to read that thread and couldn’t even. Disappointing from a forum which usually seems pretty liberal. Didn’t even try to read this one - just popped in because I noticed that you had posted here. I’m sorry for my fellow humans that you are still having to deal with these things. 
Thank you, sylvan8798. These things are especially ubiquitous and unpleasant to deal with right now, even if I’m not directly affected by what’s going on in certain places around the country these days.
I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that someone would go thru a sex change operation just to have a sports (or any other) advantage.
There was a time when someone had to go thru the operation before they could easily use the other sex’s bathroom. I worked with a man had the operation. During his transistion year (before surgery) he was told to use the unisex bathroom. Once he had the surgery, she was using the women’s bathroom.
Now, things are far less “cut and dry”. A person doesn’t even have to begin any sort of treatment or procedures, and they can self-identify as another gender. That may be fair, but it’s not without some unintended consequences.
At least one school is saying that students can choose from 6 genders. So, which male or female sports would one of those “other four” genders participate in? Wouldn’t the person choose the male or female sport that is to their best advantage?
I started this thread because I was just wondering. Money can make some people do some unscrupulus things. Might a bio-male who wants a 4 year athletic swim/tennis/golf/basketball/soccer scholarship claim to identify as a female for a few years to get his college paid for? No surgery needed. No need to change one’s name. No req’t to start hormone therapy. No need to really do anything at all. Stranger things have happened.
Please see https://www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/Transgender_Handbook_2011_Final.pdf page 13.
I am well past competing in collegiate competition, but did so many years ago and continue to compete nationally in my sport. There is a male to female transgender athlete who competes in my age group. As others have said people do not make this change so that they can gain a competitive advantage, and she certainly did not. Many of us are very supportive of her…I am among them. There are unfortunately a few who are very angry about her being allowed to compete. I still love to compete… It is a huge piece of my life…just as it was for her when she was a man and still is as a woman. I know I would hate to give it up, and know she would too. However, competing against her is not like competing against any other woman. At one point, when we were much younger, she had the fastest serve ever recorded by a woman. The “weight” of they ball she hits is different than ours. It will be very interesting to see how this is handled if a male athlete who is a high level professional, collegiate, or Olympic athlete transitions at a young age. It does pose very difficult issues.
As I said upthread- I really hope people take the time to read UCB’s links before posting. All of these questions were answered.
By the way, what do you mean by “bio male”? Are you referring to chromosomes? Genitalia? (These can be different from one another even without any medical interventions) There is no requirement for NCAA sports to prove that one is a “bio male” (whatever that means) but rather birth sex is referred to as gender/sex assigned at birth.
It’s all going to turn into competitive figure skating…
Blades of Glory
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blades_of_glory/